Switching allegiances has baseball fan feeling blue

As a baseball fan, sins come in three forms: failure to turn a foul ball over to a kid, attempting to start the wave and abandoning your team.

Though it pains me to say it, I am a sinner.

On April 8, 1969, one year after losing the Athletics, professional baseball returned to Kansas City in the form of the Royals and, with a new team in town, the fractured loyalties of Kansas Citians had to be resolved. Many chose the new Royals, a few stayed with the departed A’s and the remainder stuck with, or fled to, the St. Louis Cardinals, Middle America’s winningest franchise since Prohibition.

Seventeen years after the Royals arrived — and four months after Kansas City prevailed over St. Louis in the I-70 Series — I was born a Cardinals fan in a tiny Northwest Missouri town. Bethany sits about an hour and a half from Kansas City and five hours from St. Louis, and most of the under-40 crowd follows the boys in blue. The older generation, raised on the voices of Jack Buck and Harry Caray on powerful KMOX radio, tends to favor the Redbirds.

More than any other, I was a grandpa’s boy, and Bill Bennett was a Cardinals man. Following another team never crossed my mind. Staying with him in the summers, I logged countless hours in front of a radio hanging on every pitch. I was the only Cardinals fan my age that I knew and often drew curious looks when I told people I’d gone to a Royals interleague game to root for the visitors.

But I was what I was, and I couldn’t have been happier. I remember Royce Clayton taking — or being handed — the shortstop job from Ozzie Smith, the Mark McGwire trade and staying up late to hear Fernando Tatis hit two grand slams off of the same pitcher — it was Chan Ho Park, so don’t be too amazed — in the same inning. I watched Rick Ankiel come up and melt down, and I argued with great certainty that a hotshot kid from Kansas City’s last name couldn’t possibly be pronounced Poo-holes.

In 2004, my first year of college at the University of Missouri, the Cardinals fielded a brilliant team, starring Albert Pujols, Larry Walker, Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds. It was the best team I had ever seen, and my roommate and I watched enough games that our attendance in classes suffered. Those Cardinals powered their way to the World Series, and I went home to watch it with grandpa. Unfortunately, the Series was all-too-short in every way, as the Redbirds were swept by the Red Sox. One month later, my grandfather was killed in a logging accident. The ’04 Series was the last baseball I would see with him.

On March 17, 2005, the baseball season was preceded by controversy as McGwire and a host of other stars testified about steroids before the House Government Reform Committee, an event remembered for Rafael Palmeiro’s defiant finger wagging and the former St. Louis slugger not being there to talk about the past. McGwire had been my favorite player, and I followed the 1998 home run chase with great enthusiasm, but his embarrassing show in front of Congress crushed me.

On the field, the 2005 Cardinals fielded a team good enough to win 100 games and advance to the National League Championship Series and, surrounded by like-minded fans, I should’ve been more in-tune than ever, but I wasn’t. A year later, in 2006, I was fired from my job at an Olive Garden for skipping out to watch the Cardinals win their first World Series of my lifetime. But when it was over, the euphoria I should have felt wasn’t there, and again I didn’t know why.

In May 2006, the long-suffering — polite for “typically terrible” — Royals hired Atlanta Braves Assistant General Manager Dayton Moore to be their own GM, a move that was applauded league-wide. Moore was seen as the best possible hire and had been courted by the Red Sox just a year earlier.

With the Royals trying to turn the corner — and me in the midst of baseball’s version of a mid-life crisis — the Cardinals kept plugging along with Pujols, perhaps the greatest talent in a generation, and a star whose career I’d followed since it began. In ’06, however, Pujols was coming off as an angry, unhappy fellow, which was enough to keep him from claiming my heart.

Instead, across the state, a Kansas City writer named Joe Posnanski had piqued my interest. As a journalism major at MU, I read every word Posnanski wrote that year and found his thoughtfulness on the Royals — who usually weren’t televised in Columbia — far more interesting than the lectures of Cardinals TV man Al Hrabosky or the ramblings of radio commentator Mike Shannon, which became more grating after Jack Buck’s death in 2002. More, though, Posnanski came across as the type of family-oriented, successful writer that I wanted to be, as I’d now moved (somewhat) past my beer-bonging days into thinking about such things.

And so, with my love for baseball still strong but most of my Cardinals ties severed, I made the leap from one of baseball’s most storied franchises to a team that really, truly stunk. It was a saddening turn of events, but one I seemingly couldn’t help, a move that felt right and wasn’t altered by the nonsensical taunts of “bandwagoner” — I assure you, the Royals have no bandwagon.

Today, I remain well versed on the Cardinals, my knowledge a remnant of a different time, but watch with undying interest the rise and fall of Zack Greinke and Billy Butler, not to mention Moore.

I am the same man in love with a different team. As I found them, the Royals remain terrible.

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